reasoning” and thus teach “thinking skills,” what it means “to think like a lawyer,” and how to shape a professional legal identity. Thinking Skills “Thinking skills” are integral to the study of law. This was confirmed by their inclusion as one of six threshold learning outcomes (TLO) in Bachelor of Laws programs by the Learning and
Jan 05, 2018 · I think the idea is best captured by a metaphor trial lawyers sometimes use to describe the craft of a colleague they especially admire or an adversary they fear — he or she can “see out the front.” It means the ability to look over a complex legal situation and manage its resolution to your client’s advantage.
Nov 18, 2019 · What Does it Mean to Think Like a Lawyer. November 18, 2019 / We often hear this phrase as a new law student and maybe even covet the praise. You give an answer and the professor mentions that now you’re thinking like a lawyer before moving on to stump another student. ... Rest assured, once you get through law school you will surely know how ...
Koppelman reviews Kent Greenawalt’s book, Exemptions: Necessary, Justified, or Misguided?, which aims “to explore the complexity of many concerns about [religious] exemptions and implicitly encourage those on opposite sides of particular controversies to recognize, and perhaps even acknowledge, that competing considerations do carry some weight.” Koppelman calls the …
The key components of TLO 3 Thinking Skills are “legal reasoning,” “critical analysis” and “thinking creatively.” James (2012) drew on an abundance of literature to analyse these concepts. The definitions included those put forward in the Australian Learning and Teaching Council’s Bachelor of Laws Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement (Kift, et al., 2010). Kift et al. (2010) conceptualised “legal reasoning” as “the practice of identifying the legal rules and processes of relevance to a particular legal issue and applying those rules and processes in order to reach a reasonable conclusion about, or to generate an appropriate response to, the issue” (p. 18). Law students need to be able to discern factual issues, policy issues, relevant issues, irrelevant issues, legal issues and non-legal issues (Kift, et al., 2010).
IRAC is one of many acronyms commonly used to teach “legal reasoning” and thus teach “thinking skills,” what it means “to think like a lawyer,” and how to shape a professional legal identity.
In contemporary legal education, criterion-referenced assessment has been widely advocated as the best practice for assessing student learning (Stuckey et. al., 2007). It places emphasis on whether a law student has achieved the learning outcomes (Stuckey et. al., 2007). Three benefits of criterion-referenced assessment are advising law students upfront what is expected of them; reliable marking and encouraging students to engage in reflective practice (Stuckey et. al., 2007). The alternative approach, norm-referenced assessment, requires the distribution of raw assessment scores on a bell-curve. Anecdotally, it makes law students competitive and has a “negative effect on student motivation and learning” (Stuckey et. al., 2007).
When asked why I became a lawyer, I usually say that it seemed like a smart thing to do. Unlike some of my law school classmates, I had no illusions of becoming either a great advocate or a legal scholar. All I wanted was a comfortable income and a respectable station in life. For me, law was a safe career choice, not a passion.
Thinking like a lawyer demands thinking within the confines of inductive and deductive forms of reasoning. As law students, we entered a world of rigorous dialogue in which abstractions are formulated and then described—usually leading to the discovery of a general principle or rule, which is then distinguished from another general rule.
I had just enough left-brain skills to get me through law school and the bar. The sheer mental gymnastics necessary are a tribute to the plasticity of the human mind. Yet it is worth pondering both what we gained from the process and what we may have lost. The values we learned in law school began to spill over into our personal lives.
Thinking like a lawyer also means not taking anything for granted. Understanding why something happened, or why a certain law was enacted, enables you to apply the same rationale to other fact patterns and reach a logical conclusion. ...
1. Approach a problem from all angles. To see all the possible issues in a set of facts, lawyers look at the situation from different perspectives. Putting yourself in others’ shoes allows you to understand other points of view.
Thinking like a lawyer also requires using judgment. Just because a logical argument can be made doesn’t mean that argument is good. Judgment is necessary to determine whether a given line of reasoning or conclusion is in anyone’s best interests or advances society as a whole, or if it’s destructive and dangerous.
Deduce particular conclusions from general rules. Deductive reasoning is one of the hallmarks of thinking like a lawyer. In law, this pattern of logic is used when applying a rule of law to a particular fact pattern.
Jennifer Mueller is an in-house legal expert at wikiHow. Jennifer reviews, fact-checks, and evaluates wikiHow's legal content to ensure thoroughness and accuracy. She received her JD from Indiana University Maurer School of Law in 2006.
Syllogisms consist of three parts: a general statement, a particular statement, and a conclusion about the particular based on the general. The general statement typically is broad and nearly universally applicable. For example, you might say “All dirty floors show negligence.”.